


Everything's Fine

by beetea



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: 21 Jump Street crossover if you're paying attention, Canon-Typical Violence, Fix-It, Gen, Humor, Kingsman: The Golden Circle Fix-it, M/M, Post-Kingsman: The Golden Circle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-08
Updated: 2017-10-08
Packaged: 2019-01-10 19:39:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12306306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beetea/pseuds/beetea
Summary: No one is dead, Kingsman is just really bad at checking for survivors.





	Everything's Fine

**Author's Note:**

> This came out of a very persistent head canon wherein no one is dead and Kingsman is just really bad at checking for survivors. A bit of a 21 Jump Street crossover. Liberties taken with Kingsman canon and with science.

Kingsman, Merlin concluded, had a very bad habit of not checking for bodies. Normally he wouldn’t blame them; it was protocol, after all. Once an agent was presumed dead, unless it was mission critical, there was no use risking the lives of other agents to retrieve the body of one who had already shuffled off his or her mortal coil. Kingsman was not an agency known for its sentiment.

Besides, they had an entire unit dedicated to searching for survivors and retrieving bodies. The Retrieval unit, however, was stubbornly insistent that they only do their job when it was absolutely safe and the risk was minimal. For this reason, their work usually only involved breaking into morgues to retrieve bodies under the cloak of darkness. If anyone dared to suggest perhaps they could be a touch more expedient with their work, they would be met with a loud sigh from the director of the unit reiterating once again that these workers had the lowest security clearance and perhaps the active agents could stand to double back and do a head count if it was so important. The Retrieval unit also frequently threatened to unionize. They would all have to do with morgue capers.

Prior to their most recent mission, Merlin routinely felt a sharp pang of guilt whenever he was reminded (mostly by Eggsy) that they had never been able to retrieve Harry’s body. In the chaos surrounding V-Day, the Retrieval unit wasn’t able to so much as make it stateside for nearly 48 hours. They swept every morgue within a 200-mile radius of the church and found absolutely nothing.

“What if he’s not dead?” Eggsy would cry.

“He took a bullet to the head, lad,” Merlin would gently remind him. “If he were still alive, he would have made contact.”

Eggsy held firmly to what he called television rules: no body, not dead.

Merlin was starting to think it was a tenet Kingsman should heed more closely.

Indeed, he found it a touch unsettling how quickly an agent was to be presumed dead. To be sure, their agent-monitoring equipment was so sophisticated that if they ever lost contact, the most probable reason was, in fact, sudden death. If an agent did not make an attempt to reestablish contact within 12 hours, Kingsman declared them dead. 12 hours after that nominations were to be made for their replacement. Merlin had suspected that on at least one occasion an agent had taken advantage of this frankly hasty system to fake their own death and go on to lead out the rest of their life in obscurity far away from the secret service.

Given the day’s most recent turn of events, Merlin could see why.

If the position of the sun was any indication, it was nearing time for tea when Merlin found himself lying on the floor of a tropical jungle with a sharp ringing in his ears, trying to piece together how, exactly, he got there.

The last thing he remembers was singing his very best rendition of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” yet, and then…oh. Right. A landmine.

Merlin took inventory of his senses. His hearing was slowly coming back, though the jungle was eerily quiet. His head was foggy, likely from a concussion. His heart rate was high, but stabilizing. His breathing was slowly regulating. He buried his fingers into the dirt around him. To his left, Merlin saw a shoe that looked remarkably similar to his own Oxford, down to a tell-tale scuff on the inside of the heel.

“Oh, dear,” he gulped.

Merlin suddenly became acutely aware of the lack of sensation below his knees. He swallowed, propped himself up on his elbows and braced himself as he looked down. Where his lower legs should have been was a mess of dirt, blood and shrapnel.

The clearing ahead of him was littered with the bodies of Poppy’s henchmen. If the quiet was any indication, the mission was complete and Harry and Eggsy would be on their way home.

Merlin’s comms system was destroyed in the blast and his Kingsman-issued glasses were nearly useless, save for the prescription lenses.

He realized with considerable irritation that Kingsman no doubt thought him dead and Eggsy and Harry left without him - not even bothering to bring back his body, for pity’s sake.

Kingsman, Merlin decided, would be hearing about this.

Reinvigorated with a newfound sense of purpose, Merlin fashioned a tourniquet from strips of his undershirt and crawled towards the diner in search of any supplies that could prove themselves useful. There, he treated and cauterized his wounds as best he could and took a moment to determine his best course of action.

The next few days went as follows: Merlin cobbled together the remaining parts of Poppy’s robotic guard dogs, Benny and Jet, into two serviceable bionic legs. Though far from perfect, Merlin smugly gave himself what he thought to be a rather well-deserved pat on the back for his ingenuity and personal resilience. He quieted any thoughts that his instinct for survival was coming solely from a desire to give Harry and Eggsy a much-needed scolding.

“Let’s see Harry build himself prostheses out of dog parts,” Merlin mumbled as he adjusted the fit of the leg onto what was left of his knee joint. “Bugger can’t hack his way out of a paper bag.”

Merlin considered himself lucky that he was so self-sufficient and multi-skilled in many areas.

From there, Merlin located the small airport that housed Poppy’s personal jet. Once again pleased by his robust skill-set, Merlin fuelled the plane and made his way back to what was left of the Kingsman base.

Which is how Merlin arrived in London fully prepared to give the few remaining members of Kingsman a stern talking-to.

“You lot did a piss-poor job at checking for survivors,” Merlin loudly declared as he let himself into the main meeting room, hoping he was interrupting something important to give everyone a right shock. “You all forgot the most important thing: team—"

“Ah, Merlin. Welcome back,” Harry interjected cooly as if Merlin had arrived back from holiday, and not the dead.

Around the table sat Harry, Eggsy and, much to Merlin’s surprise, Roxy.

“Merlin!” she gasped, approximating the reaction he was hoping for.

“I thought you were dead,” he responded quietly.

“I’m fine, Merlin. Many of us are, actually. Percival, Gawain, Tristan and Bevidere all made it out unscathed as well. Our comms systems took most of the damage, really. The explosion managed to wipe out the primary, secondary and tertiary power and mainframe.”

Merlin was simultaneously impressed with Roxy and annoyed at the others.

“Of course I knew that,” he grumbled.

“Also, it turns out many of our living quarters are self-contained bunkers,” Roxy beamed. “Took two days for the Retrieval unit to dig me out after the rest of the headquarters collapsed around it, but here I am.”

“Seems we were a bit hasty initiating the Doomsday Protocol,” Eggsy chirped.

“I’m glad you could join us, Merlin,” Harry said casually. “We were just about to discuss our partnership with Statesman. Please, sit.”

Merlin sat.

“Agent Tequila will be joining us soon to help rebuild Kingsman,” Roxy started. “He’s insisted that he be accompanied by his partner, Agent Merlot.”

She passed around the dossiers containing each agent’s details.

Merlot had a rounder face than Tequila and possessed little of the rugged handsomeness that seemed to define other Statesman agents. Though the mugshot quality of the photos gave little indication of height, Merlot looked much shorter than Tequila, too.

“Merlot barely scraped by on the physical requirements of Statesman. However, he outperformed Tequila with flying colours on any test requiring intellect or problem-solving. Champagne insists together they are worth far more than the sum of their parts.”

“We suspect that some of Poppy’s operatives are still on the loose with access to a stockpile of drugs,” Roxy continued. “We will be sending Tequila and Merlot undercover to a horseback riding academy where they will integrate with the students.”

“Classic ‘find the dealer, find the supplier’ mission,” Eggsy nodded.

As the meeting continued, Merlin’s irritation waned. Though shockingly dysfunctional for the single most elite spy organization in the world, Kingsman was his dysfunctional elite spy organization, he thought fondly.

“Now, if you’ll excuse us, Eggsy and I have tickets to an Elton John concert,” Harry said, standing up with Eggsy in tow.

“Backstage passes,” Eggsy added, wagging his eyebrows at Roxy as he hurried out the door. 

“D’you think they’re actually going to see Elton John?” Roxy wondered.

“Well, they needed to turn the other way and go down the stairs to make it to the front door, so I suppose no.”

The End.


End file.
